What are the advantages and disadvantages of going first

Question

Going first, you have 9 cards to take out, and going second you have 8 cards to take out. Here are some of my ideas:

Going first better:

• If the average turn of the setter/guessers is 2 cards except one of the turns (probably the first turn where it's the easier with 9 cards) is 3 cards, is it better to first because 2+2+2+3 cards.

Going second better:

• If the average turn of the setter+guesser is 2 cards correct, then it is better to go second because 2+2+2+2=8 cards. Sometimes, aiming for 2 cards a turn is a safer play and strategy because when you try to hit 3 cards, it's very frequent that one of them may overlap an opponent's card or at worst a black card. If you have 4 animals on the board, 3 of which are yours "bear" "donkey" "crow" and 1 of which are your opponent's "dog", it can be quite difficult.

Not sure what else.

Answer 1

I think you covered most of it already; of course there are many other possible turn-counts. Theoretically team 1 can go for a 3+3+3 win in 3 turns; though that would be very difficult and require some luck as well.

Another minor advantage for team 2: On team 1's first guess, they will always have the full board of 25 options to pick from. Whereas for team 2, at least 1 and usually a 2-3 of the options will already be covered up, making the guessing for team 2 slightly easier on the first turn.

Other than that, the swings of which words got covered up when will tend to be pretty much random for either team, and I think this luck ends up outweighing any potential advantage for either team.